‘Kleider machen Leute: Jewish Men and Dress Politics in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna’
My thesis examines the role dress played in the construction of masculine Jewish identity in Vienna during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (1890–1938). As well as exploring dress as a possibly affirmative project—the well-known ‘self-fashioning’ of literary studies—I also examine how ideas about Jewish men and their fashionable appearances contributed to antisemitism as a marker of ‘Jewishness’ during this period. Dress played an important dual role within this framework of coping with and responding to antisemitism. The adoption of modern clothing—in particular the suit—by urban male populations, both Jewish and Gentile, over the course of the nineteenth century corresponded to the broad period of Jewish emancipation in Western and Central Europe. By donning these garments of urban bourgeois respectability Jewish men expressed their desire and intention to join modern European society. Using visual evidence such as photographs and illustrations, as well as written sources including literary fiction, contemporary print media, memoirs and oral history this thesis argues that far from serving exclusively as a sign of assimilatory desires Viennese Jewish men engaged in sartorial self-fashioning for multiple purposes including acculturation, as well as political, cultural and ideological purposes. In the same manner that they sought to express certain identities within their own communities and the wider Viennese society, the modern sartorial patterns, preferences and practices of Jewish men had direct implications for the antisemitic image of ‘the Jew’ and its literary and visual manifestations.
